Those are really two different things. One is the computer vision that could be “hard coded” and the other is the image library, that would be updated regularly. Look at facial recognition. You can download and run a facial recognition LLM on your GPU that looks at a library of your personal photos. The LLM doesn’t change when it scans your photos for faces, it just writes the data associated with a “face” to whatever library. When you add a new picture, it adds that face data and compares it to the library for a match. The actual LLM never needs to change. It is the same as the one I downloaded and ran on my GPU for my photos. If it was written on chips we both bought and installed, it would work the same way.[1]

[1] Yes, this is a massive simplification

You keep the "reasoning core" burned and play the cat-and-mouse game at the I/O edge. Enemy invents a smiley shield, your R&D figures out some filtering step that defeats this effect without compromising general image recognition. Then the enemy figures out a new trick, your R&D invents a countermeasure, and so on - point is, this can happen for a long time in layers on top of the core model. If the enemy invents some robust way to attack the core that cannot be filtered out, it's game over for that hardware, but that is a much more difficult task and might take longer than expected service time of a given batch of drones.